In Semester 1 (March to June) and from July Karen Miller of the Library Makerspace and Information Studies and myself are ‘clients’ for Curtin software engineering students. Their brief is to build a flexible Graphic User Interface (GUI) that connects the Microsoft Kinect 1 camera to various game engines like Minecraft so that non-programmers can easily select and modify their own gestures to a command library in the virtual world/game level.
The forerunner of this project coded by Jaiyi Zhu was cited in the NMC Technology Outlook Horizon Report. Dr Andrew Woods, HIVE manager wrote:
Our internal small grant (School of Media Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University) was successful!
Here is a synopsis of the application (redacted):
Digital Heritage, Scholarly Making & Experiential Media
We propose
A one-day workshop [Friday 26 August 2016, HIVE] with 3D, Digital APIs, UNITY and Augmented Reality workshops.
We will present our projects at that workshop and a month later meet to review progress and each other’s publications and grants.
Then we will organize with the Library and other GLAM partners a cultural hackathon in Perth where programmers and other parties spend a day creating software prototypes based on our ideas from the workshop. The best project will win a prize but the IP will be open source and contestants may be invited into the research projects or related grant applications.
Equipment to build prototypes and showcases for future grants. Part of the money will also go into Virtual Reality headsets, and Augmented Reality equipment that can be loaned out from the MCCA store to postgraduates and students.
The above would help progress the below research projects:
Another need is to develop the maker-space and digital literacy skills in information studies and the Library Makerspace, to develop a research area in scholarly making.
Another project is to integrate archives and records with real-time visualisation such as in the area of digital humanities scholarship, software training in digital humanities, and hands on workshops and crafting projects at the Curtin University Library.
Another project is to explore how SCALAR can integrate 3D and Augmented Reality and create a framework for cloud-based media assets that could dynamically relate to an online scholarly publication and whether that journal in printed form, with augmented reality trackers and head mounted displays could create multimedia scholarly journals where the multimedia is dynamically downloaded from the Internet so can be continually updated. Can this work inform future developments of eSPACE and interest in ‘scholarly making’ and makerspaces?
There is potential to create an experiential media research cluster with the new staff of SODA, to explore immersive and interactive media that can capture emotions and affects of participants or players. This requires suitable equipment.
Indiana University Press just approved the contract for the following book in their Spatial Humanities Series. The chapters may change slightly over the next half-year, and final publication is of course dependent on a full final academic review, but here is my plan for it (and I would appreciate suggestions, links, readings to add to the final product).
Title: Designing The ‘Place’ Of Virtual Space
Despite the many architects talking about virtual environments in the early 1990s (Novak, 2015, Novak and Novak, 2002, Packer and Jordan, 2002, Wiltshire, 2014), there is relatively little publicly accessible research on making, experiencing and critiquing virtual places is only in conference papers, book chapters and edited collections. These forms of academic literature are also more likely to be found in the computational sciences, and are not often or easily accessed by humanities scholars. So I have an overall purpose here: to communicate with humanities scholars the importance of understanding how digital and virtual places are designed, experienced and critiqued.
I suggest that technology is not the fundamental problem in designing virtual places. Are there specific needs or requirements of real places that prevent us from relying on digital media and ‘online worlds’ experts? Or is it not so much that the new tools are currently too cumbersome or unreliable, but instead it is our conventional understanding of place design and platially situated knowledge and information that needs to change?
Secondly, I will review concepts in various space and place-related disciplines, both historically and in terms of digital media, to examine where they converge or diverge, and which methods and tools are of relevance to digital (and especially virtual) place-making. Here I suggest the terms Place, Cultural Presence, Game and World are critically significant. Clearer definition of these terms would enrich clarify and reveal the importance of real-world place design but also for virtual world design in terms of interaction, immersion and meaning. I will then apply these terms and concepts to virtual worlds, virtual museums and online game-environments to see if the theories and predictions match what happened to the various digital environments.
Thirdly, I will describe recent development in neuroscience and how they may help our understanding of how people experience, store and recollect place-related experiences. Can these discoveries help our design of virtual places? The chapter on learning and especially place-learning will benefit from this survey of recent scientific research.
Fourth, this book will cover game mechanics, and how they can be used in virtual place design to make digital environments more engaging and the learning content more powerful and salient. The importance of interaction design is typically underplayed, under-reported and under-evaluated. We still have not truly grasped the native potential of interactive digital media as it may augment architecture, and that is why debate on the conceptual albeit thorny issues of the subject matter is still in its infancy. I believe that understanding game mechanics is of great relevance to virtual place designers and I will put forth an argument as to why, a clear definition of game mechanics and an explanation of different types of game mechanics suited to differing design purposes.
The fifth aim of this book is to give a brief introduction to new and emerging software and devices and explain how they help, hinder or replace our traditional means of designing and exploring places-is technology always an improvement here?
The last subject chapter will then explore evaluation methods (both traditional and recent), which address the complicated problem of understanding how people evaluate places, and whether this knowledge can be directly applied to the evaluation of virtual places.
Chapters
Place Theory Applied to Virtual Environments
How Mind Remembers Space, How Places are Meaningful and Evocative
Dead or Dying Virtual Worlds
Place Affordances of Virtual Environments Learnt From Affordances in Real Places
Like Assassin’s Creed but upset over how it could have made history exciting without having to employ and manipulate central historical characters? Love Lara Croft: Tomb Raider if only the tombraiding (stealing) mechanics could be replaced by something more meaningful? Wish that the Total War Series allowed you to employ agent modelling to test competing archaeological theories of migration, colonisation and invasion or just to improve its historical accuracy? Dream you could use the language, graphic vision and immersion of Far Cry Primal in the classroom to explain (through engaging interaction) the Mesolithic rather than primarily use it as a backstage to fight semi-believable creatures? Then this book is for you. Correction. This book is BY you.
Brief: Archaeologists and historians either take a game with an inspiring concept, technique or mechanic and extrapolate it to a game or simulation of the future OR they share their vision of a game or simulation that reveals, expresses or augments their own research.
1. This becomes an edited book. But wait…
The writers could meet at a workshop, bring their own designs, video cutscenes, and illustrations and media depicting what this new vision would look like or how it could be experienced or how it could be revealed. Or other writers or the public or even budding game designers could provide their own illustrations, walkthroughs, PLAYABLE DEMOS, diagrams or audio recordings of what the original author’s vision could be experienced as.
2. This becomes an online sensory experience mixed in with online chapters of the book. But wait..
3. There can also be a dynamically compiled new online game created from tagged elements of #2. The reader can either choose to read the book, to read and experience the multimedia book chapters online OR select their favourite mechanics, scenarios, techniques, illustrations etc from any or all of the chapters and then the online website automatically creates a multimedia collection to suit the tags of the chosen components..the reader has now designed, experimented, or played with a whole new potential game or scenario of archaeology, history and heritage in the future..
But wait…
4. The game designers who helped in the workshop are so inspired they help the archaeologists design these new ludic visions of the future..
We are currently accepting submissions for our upcoming Special Issue titled “Virtual Reality Games,” which will be published in International Journal of Computer Games Technology in April 2017. The Special Issue is open to both original research articles and review articles, and the deadline for submission is November 25, 2016. You can find the Call for Papers at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/si/787829/cfp/.
International Journal of Computer Games Technology has been accepted for coverage in the Emerging Sources Citation Index, which is a new edition of the Web of Science that was launched in November 2015. This means that any article published in the journal will be indexed in the Web of Science at the time of publication. The journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access publication, which means that all published articles are made freely available online at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/ without a subscription and authors retain the copyright of their work.
People are still inventing the wheel when it comes to interaction in virtual environments. But you all knew that anyway.
There is still a gap between educators and libraries who just want to get projects made, students engaged, and assets saved and those who talk about the big metadata / ontology questions. Nobody apart from Piotr used CIDOC-CRM for example and as he and I agreed, there needs to be more useful examples for archaeologists and architects.
We still need an open source augmented reality platform: Content providers will try to lock you in to their own devices (http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/602484/google-building-its-own-smartphone-report-says/) and AR software is commercial, risky and when the AR company disappears so does your augmented reality project! To add insult to injury many AR software apps store you models offline or in a secure cloud so you cannot directly access them even though you made them.[I have just heard of ARGON, will have to investigate].
There is no suitable 3D model+scholarly journal, the editor in chief of Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, Bernard Frischer, admitted their 3D solution was not yet a fully usable solution plus Elsevier say they own the model. Actually, I think the ownership of the scholarly content is as much an issue as the lack of a suitable 3D viewer. Other journals that may offer similar issues but 3D model potential are http://intarch.ac.uk/ (“All our content is open access”) and ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH). However at the workshop one of the founders of SCALAR expressed interest in exploring 3D for SCALAR so hopefully something eventuates with this working party.
This article evaluates the practical limitations and dramatic possibilities of modding (which means modifying) the commercial role-playing game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the visualization and exploration of literature. The latest version of a 20 year-old game franchise, Skyrim has inspired various writings and musings on its relation to Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities has moved to a more immersive, participative, tool-making medium, a recent report on digital archives has proposed digital tools integrate with history curricula (Sampo, 2014) and that “digital history may narrow the gap between academic and popular history”. Can games also be used to promote traditional literary mediums as well as experiential and immersive archives?
EDIT: They have the wrong version uploaded on the Sheffield website. I will add the correct version here:
This is an open access publication with a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. As such, PDF versions can be deposited in institutional repositories. Our specific copyright statement is as follows: “Copyright of all content is retained by the individual authors who are permitted to re-publish their work elsewhere. Likewise, other sites and media are permitted to re-use the works of authors on condition that they include a citation that references the content’s original publication by HRI OpenBook and an accurate attribution of the author’s IP and copyright.” Finally, there is a new Call for Papers out for DHC2016, available here: http://hridigital.shef.ac.uk/dhc2016
Lorna Richardson on twitter linked to the sketchfab blog with this provocative header.
For the life of me I don’t recall this discussion at Digital Heritage, VSMM, VAST or any of the other virtual heritage conferences I have attended and it reminds me of other problems that someone needs to summarise and dispel:
Preservation friendly tools and archives of 3D models: where are they, what are they, and how are they effectively used?
Clear and preferably verifiable reasons why 3D visualisations help the spread, democratization and understanding of the heritage objects, the intangible value and the research contribution that led to the 3D digitization
Non-jargon explanation of the use of 3D models to 2D humanities types (yes there is an issue).
Not likely to become a book, but perhaps a book chapter somewhere?
If I gathered academic colleagues and other partners to produce an Open Access Virtual Heritage/Digital Place Journal with dynamically linked 3D models viewable online or as downloads for computers or Head Mounted Display formats like WebVR perhaps) who would be a good open access publisher?
Over 4-5 April I attended the Interactive Pasts conference in Leiden, the Netherlands. It was organised by Archaeology PhD students, and they also created a gamified kickstarter project to get the funding required for an open access book publication of the proceedings. If you missed the conference (which was also on twitch), the presentations are on YouTube.
How does this relate to Interactive Fiction? Tara Copplestone and Angus Mol ran a workshop in the last session on interactive fiction.
Figure 1: #TIPC Interactive Pasts Conference Summary-Erik and Lennie photo by Tara Copplestone
Four of us (myself, Lennart Linde, Catherine Flick, B. Tyr Fothergill) used Twine (Mac version 1.42, PC is version 2.0), to develop the beginnings of an Interactive Fiction (IF) game, called A Career In Ruins, which is an archaeology conference simulator, where the student or junior researcher has to attempt to maximise their reputation while maintaining other important functions (such as phone battery and regular toilet breaks) without missing important sessions.
twine a career in ruins
FIGURE 2: IF PROTOTYPE DEVELOPED WITH TWINE 1.4.2-A CAREER IN RUINS
Firstly there is a wide range of these tools: Google Docs.
Secondly, open source HTML-based TWINE and application INFORM are perhaps two of the most widely known tools (and TWINE is perhaps best to start with for beginners), but Squiffy (Mac, PC, Linux) looks most to interesting to me, and I was happy to discover that Adobe’s Phone Gap Application can port the Squiffy interactive fiction / games to mobile phones. I think HTML is a big advantage over those formats that require readers to download a specialised executable and HTML 5 also has other possibilities such as extending to JavaScript (three.JS, Angular.jsNode.js or WebGL exported UNITY etc.). There are a variety of ways to create the 3D model for JavaScript and there are good tutorials online, the main challenge is how to incorporate 3D with interactive fiction.
There have even been IF-isometric driving games! The other possible advantages of the JavaScript that I mentioned are that they can offer videos, panoramas, and possibly 3D models.
About 10-15 years ago a program called RealViz allowed you to create 3D layers to panoramas, allowing movies and 3D objects to co-exist (would love to refind the Embarcadero example). Some exciting work and examples was done (via Shockwave 3D) with the imagemodeler but RealViz was bought out by Adobe and no longer exists. I don’t know of a comparable software application today.
However, using the above software I mentioned, I think we can link interactive fiction, panoramas, 3D models, and possibly even 3D panoramas with JavaScripted riddles (there are similar existing applications, like Pannellum).
It would be even more interesting to create these interactive-fiction panoramas for the new head mounted displays like the HTC Vive.
htc vive
FIGURE 3: HTC VIVE, DEMO, LETS MAKE GAMES, PERTH
The possibilities for creative writing and also for archaeological story-making and cultural tourism really interests me and with European partners I hope we can propose a summer workshop. Possibly we would propose two workshops, one for creative writers and cultural tourism (using people’s own holiday snaps and other media, or drawing from digital archives of local heritage) and a second for archaeologists to create interactive fiction/fact/riddles/hypotheses. The first might combine lectures on Nordic Noir and its influence on cultural tourism. If the workshops actually take place, I think they would probably be in Denmark or Greece, or both. Best to start working on the proposal, then!
? Maybe if the Sims 4 was used as anthropological machinima?
Roger Caillois wrote about four forms of play (a spectrum ranging from free play to the rules-based essence of games). He wrote about non-digital games but his work has been reviewed and critiqued by many game theorists (and anthropologists).
I still find it useful myself, but I would modify it as per the above table (not so much as forms of play but as motivators for mechanics)* and with the following comments:
Competition motivates people for two reasons, they love competing against others, and they also love long-term strategy making but these are often quite different, so perhaps this form of play is actually two forms of play?
Chance stimulates people to play because of the above, but it is also frustrating unless handled well with suitable game balance (I don’t like playing snakes and ladders because it is all about chance so perhaps I am biased).
Vertigo is an interesting one, in dance-based games, seldom in computer games (and perhaps even more dangerous in VR-Head mounted games due to the potential for nausea), and very very uncommon in games for archaeology! I will have to really investigate whether any archaeology-games use vertigo!
Mimicry: despite so many cultural rituals and games using this, this is so rare in computer games (yes, I know, Spy Party but a 7 year development cycle does not give me confidence).
Actually there is another column (not in this article) where I will bullet point some ideas for leveraging these play forms to communicate archaeological significance, progress, and controversy. For another day!
*Motivators for mechanics, what I mean here are the motivators that mechanics try to leverage, the reasons people are stimulated to play games..I understand the MDA framework may attribute this to aesthetics, but I feel their three-part theory for game design (Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics) compacts too many different components into three overly simple concepts.
What is the current version of Minecraft? Java (OpenGL) or Minecraft Win10 (Pocket edition) Direct X 12? I have just been told our version uses Java, One good bit of news for the day! My hunch is the Open GL code from Charles Henden‘s project https://www.academia.edu/1003311/A_Surround_Display_Warp-Mesh_Utility_to_Enhance_Player_Engagement) will allow us to run a Minecraft mod on a curved (or even asymmetrical) screen. But only in Open GL. Combining that with stereo may pose more challenges but even reconfigurable surface warping would be a great start. However I have been reminded not to use the word warp for this, true, it is adjusting the camera for a half-cylindrical screen:
I have to say I found this a fair and interesting book review, my book was intended more as a primer for ideas for others to both reflect on and design (as well as evaluate) virtual heritage and interactive history projects but the change in jobs (and countries) chapter structure and word parameters resulted in some chapters to be less in-depth than the topics deserved. And as I noted on Twitter there is at least one (and probably several) reasons for the apparently too-dominant focus on built heritage! So sorry archaeologists but thanks to all for retweeting the review!
We are looking at creating a projected/tracked 3D environment of Perth and Curtin for Curtin Library’s makerspace using Digital Elevation Models (DEM) from sites like
I shared on twitter a concern I had about the apparently uncritical acceptance (and especially increasing acceptance) of gamification.
I say apparently as perhaps authors of various publications do have a critical appreciation of the risks and connotations of gamification, but they don’t always share it.
Even though I touched on this in Critical Gaming, I need some percolation time for this but something for me to think about as to my immediate reaction and aversion to this (uncritical use of) gamification is that
Gamification ‘sounds’ to my ears like a trivialization of heritage. In my own research if you tell someone a digital archaeology simulation is a game they have less trouble navigating and performing tasks in the simulation but they take less care and have less respect for the cultural significance, authenticity and accuracy of that simulation.
Plus there seems to be a hidden or invisible formula: non-games, add gamification fairy dust,….games!
For if you search for richer and more defensible definitions of gamification it seems to me these definitions are getting harder and harder to separate from games per se.
Gamification implies there is a simple conversion over to games and it is a binary relationship, there are games or non-games. We need a term that implies some but not all aspects of games have been applied/incorporated/added. Ludification? Unfortunately no, it has a dangerous related meaning! Perhaps something that reflects a Paideia/Ludus scale? Playful learning or play-based learning seems to be the closest fit for me so far..
Luckily I am not alone, thanks to Trevor Owens directing me to his Meanification article and to Shawn Graham for his Gamification article. Gotta love academification.
This conference will explore the intersections of archaeology and video games. Its aim is to bring scholars and students from archaeology, history, heritage and museum studies together with game developers and designers. The program will allow for both in-depth treatment of the topic in the form of presentations, open discussion, as well as skill transference and the establishment of new ties between academia and the creative industry.
Notice the HTML and Phone output formats for the free Unreal Tournament editor, comes with some useful preset objects and behaviours. I note Google’s own 3D format O3D now exports to WebGL. WebGL and HTML5 seem to be the height of fashion at the moment!
The Red Tematica de Tecnologías Digitales para la Difusión del Patrimonio Cultural (Research Network on Digital Technologies for the Dissemination of Cultural Heritage) invited me to Mexico City on December 4 for their conference Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Interaction Design), I was asked to talk about the following:
We expect you to deliver a 45 minutes presentation, followed by 15 mins questions. It would be great if you can focus on your concept of interactive history and virtual reality, serious games, etc. The audience is composed by cultural heritage professionals (archaeologists, curators, museum personnel, librarians, etc.).
Does my below abstract sound like it is answering the above? I am not too sure:
Virtual Heritage Projects versus Digital Heritage Infrastructure
In this talk I provide my definition and perspective on Virtual Heritage and an overview of its major problems: obsolete, unreliable or overly expensive technology, a critical lack of evaluation studies, restricted interaction, low-impact pedagogical outcomes and limited community involvement. Despite two decades of research and advancing technological sophistication, the same problems are still evident. This suggests a more serious underlying issue: virtual heritage lacks a scholarly ecology, an overall system and community that provide feedback, management and scalability to virtual heritage research.
For example, in the call for the recent http://www.digitalheritage2015.org/ conference call (“The largest international scientific event on digital heritage”), evaluation is not a central issue, listed under Computer Graphics and Interaction, not under Analysis and Interpretation. And where is the focus on the user experience or examples of long-term infrastructure with feedback from the community and not just from IT professionals? Neither archaeologist nor technology expert is necessarily trained in user experience design. The projects described in papers are too often inaccessible and even less frequently preserved and the needs of the projected audience are seldom effectively evaluated.
As an antidote I will present some reflective ideas and methods, plus case studies that resolve or promise to help resolve some if not all of these issues. One way to address the importance of virtual heritage is to redefine it. I suggest virtual heritage is the attempt to convey not just the appearance but also the meaning and significance of cultural artefacts and the associated social agency that designed and used them, through the use of interactive and immersive digital media. As it has been a focus of my research I will also cover the usefulness but also danger of applying game-based design and game-based learning ideas to the development and preservation of Virtual Heritage.
Ear Zow Digital